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News About Tech, Money and InnovationTue, 31 Mar 2015 20:51:30 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1Copyright 2015, VentureBeatWhat a single Google Map of popular Thanksgiving recipes reveals about the U.S.http://venturebeat.com/2014/11/25/what-a-single-google-map-of-popular-thanksgiving-recipes-reveals-about-the-u-s/
http://venturebeat.com/2014/11/25/what-a-single-google-map-of-popular-thanksgiving-recipes-reveals-about-the-u-s/#commentsTue, 25 Nov 2014 21:06:26 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1613979Google data is all sorts of fascinating. The New York Times had Google’s science team pull data on all the most unique Thanksgiving recipes from each state (above). On its own, the map of recipes is fun to peruse. Frog eye salad is apparently super popular in Colorado and Wyoming. Pretzel salad is all the rage […]
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Frog eye salad is apparently super popular in Colorado and Wyoming. Pretzel salad is all the rage in Delaware. Pumpkin whoopie pie sounds kinda delicious, and let’s thank Vermont and Maine for bringing it some much-needed attention.

But reading between the lines, the recipes confirm some fascinating facts about the United States.

Most importantly: Immigrants’ cuisine has melded with American food. In Arizona, where Latinos account for an estimated 64 percent of the foreign-born population, people are searching for turkey enchilada recipes. In Texas, there’s sopapilla cheese cake, and in Florida, the hot dish is flan de calabaza (made from a squash common in Mexican cuisine). It’s hard to get much more literal than that about the mixing of two cultures.

It’s a telling map of how immigration complements a new culture, rather than replaces it.

On the health side of things, I’m very concerned about the cooking habits of America’s most obese states. In Kentucky, where an estimated 30 percent of the population is obese, their unique food of choice is the chess bar, which can be described as a square of butter, sugar, and fat. I don’t how a Snickers salad can be called a salad, but it makes me very worried about my friends’ arteries back in my home state of Nebraska.

This contrasts with the more health-conscience state of New York, with an obesity rate of 24 percent, where residents delight in stuffed artichoke.

Finally, there should not be any doubt that Oregon is populated with hipsters and hippies, as much of state is looking for vegan mushroom gravy.

Readers can check out the full interactive map on the New York Times‘ website.

IF you haven’t tried out IFTTT (If This Then That), THEN you are missing out on one of the most incredibly useful tools ever invented.

Especially if you’re a Square mobile payments user.

No idea what I’m babbling about? Here’s the IFTTT 101:

If This Then That lets you create so-called “recipes.” These are essentially instructions for the web-based IFTTT to automate certain actions between the services IFTTT supports. It can be as simple as “Whenever I get a new email in Gmail, send me a text.” The beauty of IFTTT is that because it supports over 119 different services (known on IFTTT as channels), you can create an almost unlimited combination of recipes that can automate everything from your home lightbulbs to your Instagram account.

A perfect example for the busy entrepreneur is the “Settlements made via Square add a row to a spreadsheet” recipe which connects Square transactions with Google Drive. So now, not only would you get the automatic transaction confirmations from Square itself, you’d also get a constantly up-to-date spreadsheet that you could use with your existing formulas to track your business.

How useful any IFTTT channel is depends entirely on the number of triggers it supports, and each channel is different. The Square channel offers:

Any new payment

This Trigger fires every time a new payment posts to your Square Merchant account.

New payment over a specific amount

This Trigger fires every time a new payment over an amount you specify posts to your Square Merchant account.

Any new refund

This Trigger fires every time a new refund posts to your Square Merchant account.

New refund over a specific amount

This Trigger fires every time a new refund over an amount you specify posts to your Square Merchant account.

Any new settlement

This Trigger fires every time a new settlement is posted to your Square Merchant account.

Don’t forget, even though IFTTT recipes are limited to automation between two channels, you can create and “stack” as many recipes as you want, which could result in some fairly sophisticated workflows.

IFTTT is rapidly becoming the favorite glue in the Internet of Things universe, at least from a consumer perspective. It may not possess the kind of extensibility that enterprise solutions have, but that’s why it’s a perfect fit for Square, which is itself a response to the difficulties created by typical enterprise payment systems.

Pinterest is smartly identifying the areas of its site that are becoming popular and then building on them. Food is one of the most-used categories on Pinterest, which makes sense as many people rely on the website as a digital recipe box.

Recently, the company released its “more useful pins” product, which embeds more information into a pin than just the pinner’s own caption. On recipes, pins often pull the ingredients list and instructions, transforming the pin into its own recipe card.

With today’s additions, you’ll be able to filter recipes by dietary preferences and needs as well. These include “gluten free,” “vegan,” and “paleo.” There’s also an “indulge me” filter, which will only return sweets results.

In November, Pinterest released a new maps feature to support another popular area of the website: travel. In this feature, pinners are able to overlay specific pins on places on a map. There are many pins on Pinterest that showcase a beautiful location, but when you click through, the original website doesn’t give any information about where the picture was snapped. The map overlay gives these pins more value.

Of course, now we’re just waiting to hear what special thing Pinterest is doing to its “wedding” section, completing the trifecta of things people obsess over on Pinterest.

More information:

More information:

]]>0Pinterest releases awesome clean-out-your-fridge tool for its food categoryNo more scrolling! Pinterest lets you search your own pinshttp://venturebeat.com/2013/06/04/pinterest-search-your-pins/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/04/pinterest-search-your-pins/#commentsTue, 04 Jun 2013 22:30:14 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=750819Pinterest is rolling out a new feature that lets you search through your own pins, which will make recipe pinners very happy.
]]>Gaming execs:Join 180 select leaders from King, Glu, Rovio, Unity, Facebook, and more to plan your path to global domination in 2015. GamesBeat Summit is invite-only -- apply here. Ticket prices increase on April 3rd!

Pinterest fixed a major problem for many pinners today. It added a search feature for your own pins so that you don’t have to go sifting through what could be hundreds of pins on one board.

How many times have you spent what feels like 10 minutes just searching for that brown sugar garlic chicken recipe you know is in your recipe board somewhere? If you’re like me, the answer is “way too many — I should just print this thing out.”

I knew this feature would have to come at some point. Finding new things on Pinterest is what the service is all about, but trying to recall one of those discoveries is annoyingly difficult. Pinterest allows you to see images that can be collected onto topic-specific boards. These boards, however, can become lengthy — particularly recipe boards — making it difficult to find a recipe you may have pinned last week.

The tool is fairly simple. You can search your previous pins using the existing search bar except now you can filter specifically for “just my pins.” Search for a specific keyword, such as “garlic brown sugar chicken,” and Pinterest will pull up any of your pins that match those keywords.

Most of the time pins seem to captioned with relevant information, such as the name of a dish, clothing designer, location, or other topics, but this may push people to add more memorable keywords to their pins.

Pinterest software engineer Hui Xu explained in a blog post that this is first available on the web version and is currently being deployed. Mobile support will come “soon.”

]]>0No more scrolling! Pinterest lets you search your own pinsNo more fast food guilt: Edamam’s healthy recipe finder hits the iPadhttp://venturebeat.com/2012/12/19/edamam-ipad-app/
http://venturebeat.com/2012/12/19/edamam-ipad-app/#commentsWed, 19 Dec 2012 15:58:47 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=593027There are plenty of recipe discovery apps and websites, but Edamam is hoping to stand out with its focus on helping you eat better.
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There are plenty of recipe discovery apps and websites, but Edamam is hoping to stand out with its focus on helping you eat better. Now the Edamam experience is even better with the launch of a new iPad app.

The company debuted at the DEMO conference in April with the goal of “organizing the world’s food knowledge.” With its free apps, also available on the iPhone and Android devices, Edamam makes it easy to find intriguing healthy recipes that just about anyone can make.

“We originally wanted to target foodies, but we discovered that the people actually using Edamam were moms,” said founder and chief executive Victor Penev in an interview with VentureBeat. “The Pinterest demographic of 30 to 45 year old women makes up most of our users because it saves them time.”

While Edamam is helpful on smartphones when shopping for ingredients, when it comes to actually cooking tablets are far superior, Penev pointed out. The Edamam iPad app, just like the app for 7-inch Android tablets, is graphically rich and plenty fast.

It doesn’t take much to get started with Edamam: You’re greeted with a massive search interface upon opening the app, but there are also helpful recommendations at the bottom of the screen. The app searches recipes from several sites based on their nutritional information. You can also easily share recipes from within the Edamam app. Within a few minutes of browsing the iPad app, I was able to find several recipes that I wanted to try.

Eventually, Penev says the company will include the ability to take notes and photos within the app. The goal, of course, is to make Edamam your go-to recipe finder and cooking tool.

Edamam is based in New York City and is currently raising an angel round.

]]>0No more fast food guilt: Edamam’s healthy recipe finder hits the iPadRecipe search engine Yummly grabs $6M to find mouth-watering recipeshttp://venturebeat.com/2012/03/21/recipe-search-engine-yummly-grabs-6m-to-find-mouth-watering-recipes/
http://venturebeat.com/2012/03/21/recipe-search-engine-yummly-grabs-6m-to-find-mouth-watering-recipes/#commentsWed, 21 Mar 2012 11:30:59 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=405757Yummly, a recipe search engine that would make any recipe hoarder and home chef happy, announced Wednesday it has raised $6 million is its first round of funding. The site compiles recipes from several popular recipes sites so you can browse and search for whatever makes your mouth water. Finding recipes online is not at all hard: […]
]]>Yummly, a recipe search engine that would make any recipe hoarder and home chef happy, announced Wednesday it has raised $6 million is its first round of funding. The site compiles recipes from several popular recipes sites so you can browse and search for whatever makes your mouth water.

Finding recipes online is not at all hard: There are hundreds of thousands of blogs and websites devoted to making delicious food. But Yummly its trying to round up tons of recipes and make them easily searchable so users don’t have to wade through all those websites.

“Our vision is to make Yummly one hub to find recipes and cook meals,” said Yummly co-founder and chief executive David Feller in an interview with VentureBeat, “We want to improve the

finding experience and have built a data platform that understands food.”

What makes Yummly stand out is its semantic recipe search, which understands the context of what people are searching for instead of focusing only on the exact keywords. It also makes good use of multiple search filters to hone your searches. Most prominently are the taste filters (shown right) — sliding bars that let you chose which tastes you prefer such as sweet, spicy, or savory — which narrow down recipes that fit your taste bud preferences. You can also filter by dietary restrictions, allergies, nutritional value, cuisines, type of meal, price of the meal, and which source the recipe comes from, such as Epicurious or AllRecipes.

“We feel semantic search is incredibly important. For example, if you searched for a fish recipe in Google, it might not understand to include results for salmon, like Yummly would,” said Feller, “Yummly doesn’t need to have the specific keyword to find what you’re looking for, it understands the context of what you’re searching.”

The interface leaves something to be desired; it’s simple, but bland. Though compared to one of its competitor’s, Cooks.com, the website is much easier to read and digest. One plus for Yummly is that it provides nutritional information for every recipe in the same format you’ve see on a food package, so you know where to find exactly what you’re looking for.

Yummly’s search engine draws is recipes from 15 food blogs and websites to make up its recipe results, hoping to save people the time they spend Googling a recipe and clicking through to multiple websites.

However, the company does face some competition from Google’s search engine, which is most people’s go-to place for finding information. Google’s plans for its own version of semantic search could make the search engine more intelligent and powerful and make Yummly redundant.

Yummly attracted funding from Physic Ventures, which led the round. Physic Ventures partner Andy Donner told VentureBeat that his firm was drawn to Yummly because of its semantic search process.

“We were compelled by the natural language scientists who really understood how to take unstructured data and make sense of it, said Donner, “Yummly is able to create meaning from recipes by parsing the data and wow users with highly accurate searches.”

Unilever Corporate Ventures, Harrison Metal Capital, First Round Capital, Intel Capital, The Harvard Common Press, and private angel investors also participated in the funding round. Yummly was founded in 2010 and is based in Palo Alto, Calif. The company has raised $7.85 million in total funding.

]]>0Recipe search engine Yummly grabs $6M to find mouth-watering recipesYahoo launches interactive recipe, shopping and entertainment search toolshttp://venturebeat.com/2011/11/15/yahoo-search-updates/
http://venturebeat.com/2011/11/15/yahoo-search-updates/#commentsWed, 16 Nov 2011 04:00:45 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=353246Search Yahoo for a recipe or gift this holiday season and you might be surprised by what you see. The company is now greeting recipe and product searchers with interactive, image-based windows atop the search results page to save them time on their internet quests. The new search tools function like guidebooks for recipe and […]
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Search Yahoo for a recipe or gift this holiday season and you might be surprised by what you see. The company is now greeting recipe and product searchers with interactive, image-based windows atop the search results page to save them time on their internet quests.

The new search tools function like guidebooks for recipe and product queries, letting you filter and compare results, and they even let you log in to Facebook from the search page and share your favorite findings with friends.

The search updates are especially interesting because of how much they’re tailored to the searcher’s intent, with a completely different presentation from the usual list of search results. There’s also a lot of social-sharing and discovery baked into each new experience. Recipe and product results encourage the searcher to engage his or her Facebook friends, and entertainment results leverage Yahoo’s partnership with Twitter to create a real-time environment that Google can’t replicate.

A recipe search — i.e. any food item plus “recipe” query — will now yield a scrollable window of photos representing the recipes of popular choices from food sites. Searchers can tab through top recipes, quick recipes and low calorie recipes, and filter recipes by ingredients.
For even more recipe options and ideas, searchers can select the new Yahoo recipe search tab. Here they can use the left-hand menu to sort recipes by preparation time, star rating, diet, meal type, occasion or source.

Product-related queries have been spruced up with a flashy scrolling window of photos too, but with results tailored around the comparison shopper. A digital camera search, for instance, will surface an array of cameras (sourced from Yahoo’s Shopping site) with model, price and retail information. Searchers can also filter results by type and price.

Yahoo has also enhanced its entertainment results to present searchers with the latest news, videos and tweets on their movie, music and celebrity queries.

“Yahoo has amazing content in almost every major category like sports, finance, local, celebrities, movies, television, music, shopping etc. In the past we have used this content for properties like Yahoo Sports, but never really used it for Search,” Shashi Seth, Yahoo SVP of Search and Marketplaces, told VentureBeat. “Now we have started building a parallel index called the content index, which provides every bit of information about entities. We are using this content index to build these amazing experiences.”

The updates also come at an important time. Holiday recipe and product queries will be on rise and Yahoo’s functionality could help it attract valuable online shoppers away from Google.

Google currently commands 65.3 percent of the U.S. search market, while Yahoo maintains 15.25 percent, according to comScore data for October 2011.

]]>0Yahoo launches interactive recipe, shopping and entertainment search toolsGojee raises $1.2M to make online recipes more personalhttp://venturebeat.com/2011/09/14/gojee-online-recipes/
http://venturebeat.com/2011/09/14/gojee-online-recipes/#commentsWed, 14 Sep 2011 15:24:37 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=331391Recipe curation and sharing site Gojee on Wednesday announced that it has raised $1.2 million, with a plan to hire more engineers and add more features to the site. New York-based company launched in early July and is playing in a crowded field because there are other better-established recipe sites on the web. Gojee wants […]
]]>Recipe curation and sharing site Gojee on Wednesday announced that it has raised $1.2 million, with a plan to hire more engineers and add more features to the site.

New York-based company launched in early July and is playing in a crowded field because there are other better-established recipe sites on the web. Gojee wants to stand out by offering a more personalized experience for finding recipes. For example, users can identify certain ingredients they “dislike” or “crave” to help the site recommend better dishes over time.

Gojee co-founder and CEO Mike LaValle told VentureBeat that the site will launch new features in about six weeks but wouldn’t let on what those features were. As of now, the site features more than 10,000 recipes and we’d bet it’s in a hurry to add even more.

The $1.2 million funding round was led by Kapor Capital. Gojee also used the opportunity to announce it had added Brad Hunstable, president and co-founder of Ustream, as a company adviser.

Personally, I’m not a huge recipe seeker but I think Gojee looks great. The interface is polished with detailed pictures to make you hungry, and the recommendation engine worked well in a brief test. Some of the first recipes it recommended me were Sriracha Marinara with Meatballs, Mini Black & White Cookies, Texas Hill Country Chili and Avocado Fries with Cilantro Lemon Dipping Sauce. It makes me ravenous just writing about it.

What do you think of Gojee? What’s your favorite recipe site?

]]>0Gojee raises $1.2M to make online recipes more personalYummly raises $1.85M for semantic recipe searcheshttp://venturebeat.com/2010/11/16/yummly-raises-1-85m-for-semantic-recipe-searches/
http://venturebeat.com/2010/11/16/yummly-raises-1-85m-for-semantic-recipe-searches/#commentsTue, 16 Nov 2010 20:30:44 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=227252Pushing forward with the trend for more and more narrow search technologies, Yummly has raised $1.85 million for its semantic search and recommendation platform for doing queries on recipes. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company makes the task of finding recipes simpler and more personal. David Feller, co-founder and chief executive of Yummly, said the company […]
]]>Pushing forward with the trend for more and more narrow search technologies, Yummly has raised $1.85 million for its semantic search and recommendation platform for doing queries on recipes.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company makes the task of finding recipes simpler and more personal. David Feller, co-founder and chief executive of Yummly, said the company will use the money to expand its services. He said the company employs a cornucopia of algorithms to help it understand more than 15,000 food ingredients on a variety of levels (from nutritional value to taste). It combines that with knowledge of your own taste. The result is a more sophisticated food search tool with personalized taste in finding recipes. The site, started in 2009, has more than 500,000 recipes.

The seed round of funding came from First Round Capital, Harrison Metal Capital, Intel Capital and angels. Michael Dearing of Harrison Metal Capital and angel investor Marcia Hooper will join the company’s board.

With its focus on doing search for one particular thing, Yummly resembles other successful sites such as Pandora Radio (songs) and Netflix (movies). The site can filter recipe searches by ingredients, allergens, price, prep time, nutrition, holidays and meal courses, diet restrictions, food for vegans and other categories. Users can publish their own recipes and make custom meal plans. You can also make friends with other cooking fans via the company’s own TasteBuds network or Facebook.